1. Technical Field
The present application relates to systems and methods for geofencing, and more particularly, to systems and methods for improving the accuracy of geofences for specified locations.
2. Related Art
A geofence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geofence may be dynamically generated—as in a radius around a store or point location—or a geofence can be a predefined set of boundaries, like school attendance zones or neighborhood boundaries. Geofences typically are used to trigger an event when the perimeter is breached. For example, a person may set a radius around his/her house, usually through a software application; the owner may be informed when his dog, wearing a location-aware collar, goes beyond this set perimeter.
Another example is an ankle monitor that may be used for monitoring criminals under house arrest. An ankle monitor may send a signal containing location and other information to a receiver. If the person being tracked moves outside of an allowed range, the police may be notified. Some ankle monitors also are used to monitor violations of restraining orders—in this case the wearer of the monitors are not allowed to breach the set geofence.
Geofences are a great innovation in tracking, however the timeliness and accuracy of the triggers are greatly dependent on their placement and size. Ideally, the geofence should encompass the entire area of interest. Gaps in coverage or overlaps to other areas may result in false positive triggers or no triggering at all, both of which are problematic for products and services that rely on location accuracy or geofence triggers.
Currently, geofences are set manually or dynamically. Manually setting a geofence is a laborious process that demands the person establishing the geofence have detailed knowledge of the area of interest. For example, to manually establish a geofence, a person typically must (1) determine and record the center of the area of interest, (2) determine and record the radius of the geofence, (3) enter this information into an application, and (4) set the type of trigger in the application. Thus, a person is required to know the coordinates of the location, or use a visual representation of the location, such as a map. Even if this information and man-power is available, manually establishing a geofence for a non-stationary area of interest, such as a mobile device, is difficult and impractical.
Applications that assist a user in manually generating a geofence typically use a common method of geofencing where the user chooses a desired destination and then manually chooses the size and positioning of the geofence on a map. The user may be prompted to choose a geofence radius in set increments, such as 500 feet (ft.), 1000 ft., 0.5 miles (mi), 1 mi, 2 mi or other predefined size. The user then may move the geofence freely on the map. Although this may work for some users and purposes, this method as a whole is limited and inefficient as users often run in to the same issues where the trigger either happens prematurely or not at all. An additional layer of complication in current methods is the fact that they need a user to orient the geofence in the correct place. This leaves room for extensive errors on the user's part, leading to false positives or non-triggers that in turn makes the product or service associated with the geofence to be inefficient as well.
To alleviate the burden of manual geofencing, some systems dynamically generate geofences. In a typical scenario, these data providers may determine a latitude and longitude for an area of interest through a method called address interpolation where a proximate location for an area of interest is inferred from its address. For example, 750 Main Street may be estimated to be half-way between 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue on Main Street. However, address interpolation results in poorly determined latitudes and longitudes that often may be off by hundreds of meters. As a result, a user may be standing directly at the point of interest and not trigger the geofence.
Accordingly, a need has long existed for improved systems and methods for geofencing.